Learning a Musical Instrument After 50 Could Protect Your Brain, New Research Finds

Erica Jones’s mother gave her two pieces of advice when she was a girl. The first was to play tennis. It was a more social sport, she told her. The second was to play the piano. Erica ignored both. But now, at 61, the New York cardiologist is revisiting one of those pieces of advice.

“I’m a preventive cardiologist,” she adds. “I’m all about preserving overall health and learning an instrument, I know, is part of a healthy life.”

Mothers do know best, it turns out. A wave of new research over the last several years has made a measurable case for what Jones’s mother knew: learning a musical instrument later in life can meaningfully protect the aging brain from decline. Jen Krizman, a neuroscientist at Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, known as Brainvolts, has spent her career studying how musical training rewires the brain. She calls music “the brain jackpot.”

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“It’s the best way to train the brain,” she said. “It engages your auditory system. It engages how you think, how you move, how you feel. It engages the whole brain.”

What learning an instrument, or studying music does inside the brain, Krizman explains, is teach neurons to fire more precisely together.

“Music works by increasing neural synchrony — the synchronous firing within and across the brain,” she said. “By having this greater neural precision, you’re able to do more with the sound that you hear.”

Science behind the beats

Data is increasingly backing this up. A 2025 Monash University study of nearly 11,000 Australian adults aged 70 and older found that those who played an instrument had a 35 percent reduced risk of dementia. Frequent music listeners had a 39 percent lower risk.

A University of Exeter study of more than 1,100 adults over 40 found that playing an instrument — particularly piano or keyboard — was tied to better working memory and executive function. A Kyoto University team tracked older adults, average age 73, who had recently started learning an instrument. Four years later, those who kept playing showed no cognitive decline. Those who stopped had measurable shrinkage in the putamen, the brain region responsible for motor function, learning, and memory.

A paper in PLOS Biology found that older musicians’ brains responded to complex listening tasks similarly to those of people in their 20s. It’s what researchers call “cognitive reserve.” And yet only 17 percent of U.S. adults aged 50 to 80 play an instrument even a few times a year, according to a 2024 University of Michigan poll. Krizman is not surprised by the data. She has watched the same effect in her own lab for more than a decade.

In a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Krizman and her Brainvolts colleagues followed Chicago Public Schools students through their high school years. Those who took in-school music classes maintained the consistency of how their brains processed sound. A control group of students who did not take music showed the typical adolescent waning of those same neural responses. Two years of music instruction was enough to shift the trajectory.

“Every little bit helps,” she said. “The more you do, the more benefits you find.”

Erica’s husband, Doug, picked up the guitar in his late 50s. He had never played an instrument before.

A retired hedge fund manager who had spent his working life inside spreadsheets, he came to the instrument the way he had come to a lot of things through what he calls the craftsman mindset.

“I read a couple of articles, and the only way to do certain things is to just do them,” he said. “Stop worrying if you’re going to be good at it. Just do it.”

The first year was hard, he acknowledged. He could not remember a four- or five-step sequence on the fretboard. Now he can.

“It’s a different kind of memory,” he said. “It’s not like memorizing a poem. It’s a muscle memory.”

He and Erica study with the same teacher, guitarist and musician Adrienne McKay. They wanted, Erica said, something challenging and joyful to share into retirement. Doug has noticed that the practice itself has changed how he thinks.

“In music, you have to break each step down and learn the little pieces and then you build it all back together. You start at a slow tempo, and you speed it up until you get there,” he said. “I never did that in any other part of my life. Now I do it in a lot of things.”

He even thinks the guitar has made him a better golfer. McKay has shepherded plenty of adult beginners through their first chords. The hardest part, she said, is not the instrument itself but what comes after the first burst of progress.

“There are points when you are learning an instrument where you level out, and then you have to really focus on it,” she said.

The plateaus, in her experience, are the actual work of learning. The challenges, sometimes, can also include the isolation of practicing.

“A good part of playing music is the communal aspect,” she said. “They get to a level with guitar, and they want an outlet for it, and they don’t have that. They might not be good enough to go to an open mic, but they would still benefit from having a band.”

“(Music) is the best way to train the brain. It engages your auditory system. It engages how you think, how you move, how you feel. It engages the whole brain.”

Jen Krizman, a neuroscientist at Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory

A dream not deferred this time

Orsola Fezzi was 46 when she became a singer.

A New Yorker by way of Italy, Fezzi had built a career as an art conservator and had not, in any serious sense, sung. Then one night she had a dream. She was in a jazz club, on a stool, in a black dress behind heavy velvet curtains. She was a singer. She found voice teacher Valentina Marino and began. Four years later, she now writes her own songs and performs as a soloist in the tradition of Nina Simone, Etta James, and Beth Hart on stages across Europe and England.

“I am a proud singer of my age,” she said. “I never felt that I was old. First of all, I feel 16. But I believe that music, and any kind of art, is ageless.”

Beginning as an adult is unforgiving, she said. Technique is hard, and the body has to be trained carefully. But she does not see those difficulties as belonging to age.

“You have to be strong and willing to fail and to cry,” she said. “But that’s not because I started at 46. That’s what it takes.”

Marino, who has been teaching Fezzi for the last four years, is also a singer, songwriter and vocalist and teaches in New York. She teaches voice and instruments to both children and adults. She has come to believe that her oldest students share something specific with her youngest.

“The main difference between adults and children is a lack of spontaneity,” Marino said. “We as instructors have to work hard to deconstruct their habit of (adults) not wanting to just let go, of being over-cautious about how they perform. For many adults, learning a new instrument is about wanting to prove to themselves they can do something well.”

But the oldest students, she said, often come out the other side of that caution.

“As soon as they loosen up a little, they are not much different than children,” Marino said. “They are transported to this place where they want to connect to their inner child. They are not worried about holding back anymore. And this happens with the oldest students.”

She thinks of one student named Mark, an 84-year-old retiree who used to play clarinet in high school before he put it down for sixty years. His wife had complained about his humming around the house. He came to Marino for voice lessons partly to learn to sing well enough to please his wife. He climbed the stairs to her walk-up apartment every week, hearing aid in, and never missed a lesson. He started coming to her jazz gigs. He sat in once, with her band, and sang.

“It really became his personal journey,” Marino said. “Something he started doing for himself.”

Gavin Gold, a guitar teacher in New York, says one of the hardest things he has noticed for his older students is transitions between chords. But what they do bring that not all his younger students have is focus.

“To start at the age of 60, to be able to get through a song and on key — that’s quite an achievement.”

When music triggers a memory and a connection so strong

Krizman has seen what music can do at the far end of cognitive decline.

She recounted a story told to her by a colleague, a soprano named Nancy Gustafson, who runs an organization called Songs by Heart that brings music into nursing homes. Gustafson started it after her own mother’s dementia had progressed to the point that she no longer recognized her children. One Christmas, Gustafson sat down at her mother’s piano. By her own admission, she was not much of a pianist. But she played a carol anyway.

Her mother began to sing along.

They got through the song together. At the end, her mother turned to her and said: Nancy, this was fun. But you’re not a very good piano player.

For one moment, her mother had known her daughter’s name. She had even known her well enough to tease her.

“It’s just delightful that her mother in that moment knew her enough to say, This is my daughter, and that she can critique her daughter’s playing skills like an inside joke,” Krizman said. “We think it’s that powerful in a severe case of dementia. Why can’t it be that powerful in earlier cases — to help give them that connection to reality, to light, to cognition, to others?”

Some advice for starting out with a musical instrument later in life:

• Pick music you love. The songs of your life are the syllabus. Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Coldplay, Nina Simone — start with what already lives in your ear.
• Expect plateaus. The first burst of progress is the easy part. What follows is not failure; it is the actual work of learning.
• Find a teacher who works in repertoire, not drills. Songs sustain practice. Scales do not.
• Don’t play alone forever. Find people to play with eventually, even casually. Isolation is what makes adult students quit.
• An easy entry point: try a choir. Krizman’s first recommendation for people who feel intimidated by guitar or piano.